“When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it.”

“your name your name, paragal, in the old toung, means 'one of pure light' and so you once were. but know this: when your stroke gfalls, so shall your own star fall. Your light will go out, and you will earn a newname. You shall be caled paragor - 'one of true darkness.' darkness will be your dwelling place and it will consume you. You willl ever be hungry for what you can naver have, No darkness in alleble will be as you ”

“All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.”

“The problem in narcissism is not the high ideals and ambitions, it's the difficulty one encounters when trying to give them body.”

“Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.”

“Adoption. A realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them!”

“Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.”